Meditation & Logic

If all your experience can be explained logically, then you have missed something very important in life. - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

In the state of Sampragnata Samadhi (conscious awareness), special logic is together with the experience of meditation in which all experiences and thoughts exist, accompanied by bliss and the experience of just 'I am'.

Three Types of Logic

To know yourself or to judge your actions you need to know three types of logic: Tarka, Kutarka, and Vitarka.

Tarka

Tarka means logic. It is sequential logical understanding; it increases scientific knowledge. When sequential logical understanding changes, then scientific conclusions change. For example, pesticides were considered to be very useful in the past, and are now proven to be more harmful. In tarka, the paradigm changes.

Kutarka

Kutarka means wrong logic or illogical, where the intention is not right. Logic is applied here with the sole purpose of finding fault. One knows deep inside that it is not right, but still, logically you prove that it is right. This is called Kutarka.

For example: The door is half open means the door is half closed. Therefore, the door is fully open means the door is fully closed! Or God is Love. Love is Blind. Therefore, God is Blind!!!

Vitarka

Vitarka is special logic that one uses to pursue in the world and to perceive the truth. For example, knowledge of Patanjali yoga sutras.

Logic Leads to Samadhi

Logically you understand this knowledge, and even reading this or talking about this has a certain effect on our consciousness. This is samâdhi, which means equanimous. Dhi is the intellect or the faculty of consciousness that sustains you. Even when we are talking about the self with a definite logic we are in a state of samâdhi.

Vitarka is asking questions to which there are no evident answers....Who am I? Where am I? What do I really want? These philosophically appealing questions bring forth spiritual knowledge, increase your awareness, and bring about the blossoming of Consciousness, i.e., Atma Gyan (knowledge of Self) increases.

Vitarka – logic that cannot be reversed

Logic can always change. Vitarka is logic that cannot be condemned, that cannot be reversed. For example, if somebody is dead and you are standing there, it is obvious that they are dead and you know that the life that was there is not there anymore. At that moment your consciousness is in a different state. When you are not emotionally connected to somebody, say, then what is happening to your consciousness? You feel this is the end. Like, when a movie is over, there is a feeling that it is all over. People walk out of the movie theatre and you see that they walk out in a particular state of consciousness. At that moment there is logic in their minds, which is irrefutable and irreversible.

Everything is changing or is bound to change, bound to dissolve and disappear. This is obvious. This vitarka elevates one’s consciousness.

How to experience this?

To experience this, one does not have to sit with their eyes closed. With eyes open itself this is obvious, the feeling of ‘I’. Everything is empty. Everything is in a state of fluidity.

The whole world is just a “quantum mechanical field”. This is vitarka.

The entire science is based on tarka or logic. An irrefutable tarka of it is quantum physics.

The calm of mind (or meditative experience) that you get from this special logic is vitarkanugama samadhi.